


Sicker Than Love (Love, Love)

by skyline



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Cheating, Existential Angst, F/M, M/M, Relationship Problems, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 11:54:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4563630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyline/pseuds/skyline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You brought this on yourself,” Nate says, just in case Dan doesn’t fully understand the implications of cheating on his girlfriend.</p>
<p>He does.</p>
<p>He totally does.</p>
<p>He’s just not entirely sure how much he regrets it, yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sicker Than Love (Love, Love)

**Author's Note:**

> I just marathonned all six seasons of Gossip Girl (last year, so obviously this has been sitting mostly finished for a while), and even though I’m perfectly happy with how it ended, I still wish Blair/Dan had a teensy bit longer, more believable arc. So I tried to write me some closure that takes place after the show but before Serena and Dan get hitched. Only that closure morphed into something different, as I began going through a really rough patch in my personal life, and this happened. I…don’t really know how I feel about this, consequently. You’ve been warned.

_After_.

* * *

Serena’s got legs for days and can hold a grudge for just as long.

Dan bangs his head against the glossy mahogany of the antique writing desk she bought him for their three year anniversary and wonders why exactly he always makes the worst possible mistakes when it comes to relationships. He can’t just drift apart from a girl – no. He’s got to fuck everything up with a threesome, or a fake baby, or having raucous, illicit sex in a former tycoon’s office in Grand Central Station.

Things were a lot easier back in Brooklyn, when the biggest secret he had was moonlighting as a teenage girl. But his experiment as a scandalmonger is long ended, and in the absence of Gossip Girl, it’s almost like he’s regrown a conscience.

Nate, not so much.

“Sorry, man,” He shrugs and flashes that stupid, cheeky smile that’s turned his bedroom into a revolving door for hot, sexually adventurous women. “It’s just business.”

Dan rolls his face so that his cheek is against cool wood. He squints up at Nate and mutters, “You could have given me a heads up.”

“I could have,” Nate agrees happily. He’s getting way too much enjoyment out of this.

“You’re getting way too much enjoyment out of this,” Dan voices the thought, because yeah, sadism is something that real friends point out and recommend treatment for.

Laughing, Nate consoles him, “Serena will forgive you. Probably. Maybe. Eh.”

“Bad at helping is a thing that you are.” Dan bangs his head against the writing desk once more, for good measure. “Where did she run off to this time?”

“Ah. Rural India, I think. Or maybe it was Kenya?”

“Somewhere they don’t have consistent electricity or cell service, is what you’re saying.” Dan groans, albeit a bit weakly. “I’ve failed pretty spectacularly at being a boyfriend, haven’t I?”

“The pictures aren’t that bad. Except for maybe the one where you’re grabbing Blair’s ass.”

“It was her upper thigh.”

“I’m willing to bet you grabbed her ass at some point.”

“Is that something you think about a lot? My hands on Blair Waldorf’s ass?”

Nate shrugs again, easy lacrosse grace and a lifetime of magnificently well reinforced self-confidence making him radiate nonchalance and it-will-be-okay vibes. Dan hates him, a little.

Dan hates everything a little, right now. “We were drunk.”

“That was clearly evident,” Nate chortles, enjoying his emergence from irrelevancy way too much. “I’d worry less about Serena and more about what Chuck’s going to do with you once he crawls out of bed.”

The initial spark of panic that turns Dan’s stomach into a frenzied mess dies down almost immediately, because – “Chuck was there.”

“What?”

“What kind of research are you doing at that newspaper? Chuck. Was. There.”

“I’m sorry, it sounded like you just said Chuck Bass watched you make out with his wife.”

“That I did, my friend.”

“Is it just me, or do they get more twisted every day?”

Dan declines to answer. He’s still reeling from the story on the front page of the Spectator’s morning issue, where he’s depicted in plenty of compromising positions that look a lot more risqué than they were. Of course, it’s not like he ever got a chance to explain any of it to Serena – she was out the door before he even lifted his head off his slightly-drooled-on pillow.

“You brought this on yourself,” Nate says, just in case Dan doesn’t fully understand the implications of cheating on his girlfriend.

He does.

He totally does.

He’s just not entirely sure how much he regrets it, yet.

Serena’s slipped up a fair amount in the past three years – so many times that Dan’s thought hard and long about what the parameters of an open relationship would mean. But that doesn’t mean this particular incident was either warranted or something she deserved.

For years, Serena’s done a really good job of pretending Dan doesn’t still have feelings for Blair. Now that pretense has shattered all over the foyer of every Upper East Sider she knows. Dan can’t actually blame her for running.

“I’ve got to fix this.”

“By booking a flight to India?” Nate suggests in a tone that belies he knows Dan plans on doing no such thing.

“Sure,” Dan agrees. “Right after I get really, really drunk.”

Nate shakes his head, all shiny bronze hair and begrudging admiration. “You keep digging that hole.”

Dan glares up at him and his rolled up issue of the Spectator and his upbeat demeanor and wonders why he ever wanted to be a part of this world.

* * *

_Before._

* * *

She smells like Chanel No. 5 and expensive face cream and sweeter undertones of shampoo, and when she stomps past him to the glittering bar, it’s a scent-tornado that assaults his nose. Against his will, Dan’s mind drifts all Pavlovian-like to the last night they spent cuddled under a threadbare blanket from his grandma, watching Audrey Hepburn movies and crunching on chocolate caramel-buttered popcorn from Citarella.

He watches her, haloed by about three hundred bottles of top shelf liquor that glow eerie from the bar’s backlighting. She’s antsy, unhappy. She waves impatiently at the bartender, and then at a harassed looking bar back who tries to explain that he isn’t allowed to pour drinks.

It’s not like that stops her. She’s Blair Waldorf-Bass, and she gets what she wants, when she wants it.

Dan would loathe her if he didn’t like her so damn much.

“What are you doing here?” Blair asks, without even glancing up when he approaches her side. She’s already halfway through her cocktail.

“Where’s Chuck?” He retorts, because seeing her sans him or her minions these days occurs about as frequently as a blue moon.

Blair considers, all haughty and bristling and beautiful. “Business.”

Dan regards her right back, narrowing his eyes and trying his damndest to pull off some semblance of cool, which, he’s probably failing. Blair always gets his heart racing, with fury or anxiety or sometimes, something more…inexplicable.

“Me too. I had a meeting with my agent.” He gestures towards a plump, older man in the corner, cheeks flushed with whiskey. He’s not quite as pretty as Alessandra, but he is a hell of a lot more loyal, which is all that matters.

“No one’s interested in reading Inside Out Again: Brooklyn’s Revenge, Humphrey.”

“This one doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Everything has to do with me,” Blair counters, arching one of those perfectly drawn-on eyebrows. She sees right through him in a way Serena never has.

“Maybe,” Dan allows, because the Monarch in his dystopian Manhattanite reboot does bear a striking resemblance to the former Princess of Monaco, and there’s not much point in lying about it. He taps the side of her now-empty glass. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Please. I can buy this entire bar.”

“Doesn’t mean you should have to.”

She makes this gesture somewhere between a shrug and an eye roll, but doesn’t stop him when he waves down the bartender, who is regrettably more responsive towards Dan than he was to Blair. Dan can already tell she’s scheming to get the poor guy fired; he catches the crook of her elbow and pulls her off to an empty table before she can cause a scene.

“Enough with the man-handling, Humphrey. You were never any good at it,” Blair snorts, all turned up nose and cute sense of superiority.

Dan ignores the jab, because she liked him just fine in the bedroom, okay, and says, “Glad to see that married life hasn’t dulled that sharp wit of yours, Blair. I was worried. Concerned, really.”

“Oh shut up and drink with me,” she says in a huff, almost fond, but not quite.

Dating Blair had been a bizarre experiment in masochism that Dan’s never really found it in him to regret. Call him an adventurer. Or don’t, whatever, he doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about his love life.

“Yes ma’am,” he retorts with as much sarcasm as he can muster, which is less than he likes. Petulantly, he picks up the crystal highball glass and sniffs at the – “Is this scotch? Since when do we scotch?”

Blair sniffs. “I’ve been drinking scotch since I was fourteen. God, what do they feed you in Brooklyn?”

“Waffles, mostly.”

“Well, drink up,” Blair commands, shuffling their cups around so that she’s got his gin and tonic and he’s cupping the tumbler of every writer’s favorite liquid literary companion. “Grow some hair on that scrawny chest of yours.”

“You’re not the boss of me, Blair.”

“I can be,” she offers. “I can buy whatever mid-range publishing house you’re courting this week.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Embarrassed I’ll read a sad-sack first draft?”

“Horrified you might make an impact on literature as we know it,” he replies, because she’s in one of those moods where _insult_ is the only language she wants to speak.

She grins, all ruby-red lips and wicked delight. “Feisty, Humphrey. Aren’t thing A-Okay in the van der Woodsen lovenest?”

“I wish you’d stop calling it that.”

“Aha!” She sips his gin daintily. “Side-stepping the question.”

“Please, Serena tells you everything. You probably have a better grasp on my love life than I do.”

Blair nods. “I am known to be well informed-”

“How very Big Brother of you.”

“- _but_ ,” Blair continues icily, “Serena and I are currently incommunicado. Which you would know if you were a semi-decent boyfriend. Poor form, Humphrey. Poor form.”

Dan swallows. “That’s news to me.”

“Is it, though?”

There is a thing Blair is really, really good at, and that thing is looking completely unimpressed with Dan’s innocent face.

“Kind of. In a way.”

Blair mouths _in a way_ like it’s the most ludicrous thing she’s ever heard. “Do you know why my best friend in the entire freaking world isn’t talking to me, Humphrey. I’ll give you three guesses.”

He only needs one.

Gulping in a deep mouthful of air, he stammers, “I can explain-“

“That doesn’t sound like a guess.”

She drums her fingers against the table expectantly, ready to force all his secrets out of him. Why can’t Blair every do anything the easy way?

Dan sighs. “Because of me?”

Blair jabs at him, right in the chest, with one perfectly manicured, perfectly pointed fingernail. Her lips part, apple red.

She says, “ _Bingo_.”

* * *

_After._

* * *

So yeah, Dan royally fucked his life up.

Again.

How many times can a person do that before they turn thirty? He thinks the number probably shouldn’t be as high as his is.

“Serena,” he implores her voicemail. “Call me back?”

No. That won’t do at all.

He jabs a button. A mechanical lady asks if he’d like to save his message or record it again, and he opts for the latter, because _call me back_ shouldn’t sound like a question. If Serena wants to end their relationship, okay, he’s down for that, but she needs to at least talk to him about it. After all, that’s the courtesy he extended her the last time she strayed right into an oil tycoon’s boudoir.

Their relationship is weird. He acknowledges that it’s weird.

The way Dan thinks of it is that they belong together, maybe, possibly, probably. There’s no other way to explain their completely magnetic connection, the ridiculous codependence they develop every time they commit to making it work and being a couple.

They belong together, but that’s fucking terrifying. They’re too young, too impulsive, too busy trying to get their shit together. Serena’s never been like Chuck or Blair, raised to take over an empire, fashion or otherwise. Her mother’s main job, as fond of Lily as Dan is, falls squarely under the heading of _housewife_. And it’s not like she set any kind of example in the romance department, either. It makes sense that Serena’s never quite sure if a good thing is what she’s got, whether it’s a job or a boyfriend. She’s figuring herself out. Dan doesn’t begrudge her for it.

He’s the one with no excuse.

Sure, his hippie-dippie parents were faux-in-love, but that doesn’t mean he’s primed to follow in their footsteps. Blair is…

Calling her a mistake doesn’t sound quite right, so he doesn’t.

Blair is the outlier on his otherwise good-guy trajectory. She’s the blip he never saw on his radar, right until it was too late. And just when he was figuring out whether she was the thing that was going to set his epic destiny with Serena forever off course, Chuck snatched her away. And since then he’s wondered.

Serena’s always sensed that, he thinks.

Or no, she’s known.

She’s really smart, is the thing. Even when Dan refused to talk about it, she knew, and she pressed, and the night before last, he broke.

He broke, and he told her everything.

So of course she immediately went and told Blair.

Dan would kill for a friendship like that. Only, he thinks there’s something that Serena left out of the details about their fight. He wonders if she was ashamed to tell Blair about it, or if she thought the plan wouldn’t work if she did.

Their argument went like this:

 

He’d said, “I don’t know how I feel about her. I don’t know if I love her, or if I want to fuck her, or what I want, exactly. All I know is that I don’t know, that I don’t have closure, and that that’s coming between us.”

 

He’d said, “I’m sorry, Serena. I’m so sorry.”

 

And she had stared him down with those warm, wild blue eyes of hers. There in the living room they shared, in the van der Woodsen _lovenest_ , she hadn’t screamed, and she hadn’t shouted.

 

Serena said, “You need to figure this out, Dan.”

 

She’d said, “I’m going to help you figure this out.”

* * *

_Before._

* * *

Blair tastes like whiskey, the hard tang and honey. She kisses pistol-quick, too flirty, too daring. She’s done this before, Dan thinks.

“You’ve done this before,” he gasps, half-drowned in the taste of her lips and the soft curve of her breasts, choking on the haute couture scent of her.

“You? Yes.” She cocks her head to the side like, _don’t be stupid Humphrey_. No one has ever made him feel stupid the way Blair can.

“No, this,” he insists, “Cheating on Chuck.”

“I’m not cheating on Chuck.”

“You and I have very different definitions of cheating.”

“Please. Adultery is such a plebian faux pas.” She doesn’t mention her own father, Chuck’s parents, or even his own. (Plebian, for Blair, has nothing to do with social status. It’s a state of mind.) Instead she holds her head up regally high, bosom spilling out of her bra, and announces, “Chuck likes to watch.”

“Chuck likes to…” Dan pales. “Oh god. Is he _here_?”

“Is that a problem?” Blair demands, tugging at his belt buckle, and whatever protests Dan had die before they leave his mouth. One would think Chuck Bass lurking in the shadows like a skulking skulker who skulks would complete kill his hard on, but yeah, actually, no.

If anything, he’s even more ready to go, and doesn’t that say a lot about Dan Humphrey?

There’s some kind of ruffled contraption on the floor, and he thinks it came off of Blair’s torso, or maybe her bottom half, but all he cares is that he trips over it on the way to the bed. She falls back against her insanely expensive comforter with a squeal of glee, and if either of them are thinking about Serena, they don’t say so.

Dan could almost feel guilty about that, but he doesn’t, not for a second, because Blair is there, and she’s naked, and he can’t seem to tear his eyes or his thoughts away from a single perfect inch of her.

It’s only when his pants drop down around his ankles that Dan feels the palm pressed squarely against his back.

* * *

_After._

* * *

She’d said, “I’m going to help you figure this out,” and Dan wonders if he’ll ever know whether Serena knew exactly what was going to happen.

* * *

_Before._

* * *

 

“Pretend the camera isn’t here,” Chuck instructs, kissing his neck, and wow, Dan probably shouldn’t be as into that as he is. “Act natural.”

He’s not sure what natural is, but he’s relatively certain it doesn’t involve peeling the panties off Chuck’s wife, burying his face between her legs and licking up what he can until she pulls him by the hair and demands, “Are you ever going to man up and fuck me, Humphrey?”

Chuck laughs, the sick bastard, the lens of the camera glinting where his eyes should be, because this is professional level, for-later-use photography that Dan should really put an end to, only Blair’s shoving his boxers down with some dismissive comment about their quality, and Chuck’s making this weird, like, purring sound, and Dan is really fucking distracted, okay?

So he forgets about the camera and starts thinking more about Blair, Blair who is soft and sweet when he sinks into her, but bites his shoulder with her needle-y teeth and nearly draws blood. Blair, who is more fun in bed than he’d ever remembered.

She watches him with those big does eyes of hers and draws him deeper, unwittingly, and there’s this part of Dan that knows none of this is right, but there’s a bigger part of him that just can’t find it in him to give a damn. He can hear the slap of Chuck’s hand on skin behind him, the soft press of his mouth, and fingers where Dan is pretty sure he never thought another person’s fingers would be. And all of it, every part, makes the experience bigger, more intense, realer.

Blair kisses and bites his neck, begging him sweetly to make her come, and Chuck urges him with his own wandering fingers and mouth. They push and they pull, they hiss and they moan, and the guide Dan right over the edge, until he can’t see anything but white.

And when it’s over, they sandwich him between their bodies in the bed, comfortable and warm. So Dan wonders why, exactly, it is that he feels wrecked.

Only he knows the answer; it’s because there are the two of them. Together. Even after he leaves. What he thought he felt for Blair doesn’t matter in the middle of the night, when she’s reaching across his body to brush her fingertips against Chuck’s cheek. He’s not as happy to be here as he thought he would be.

Because if Blair is the one, the way he’d secretly feared, why can’t he relax? What does that mean?

He extricates himself from Chuck and Blair’s twisted embrace and sneaks back home, to Serena.

She sighs in her sleep, cuddling her body close. She is safe. She is home. That’s what Dan thinks as he drifts into a dream…

Of course, all those thoughts are wiped clean when he wakes up to his naked ass on the front page of the Spectator and no trace of the love of his life other than a last whiff of her perfume.

* * *

_After._

* * *

“Dan, hey. Sorry I missed your call; I was still in the air. How did things go with Blair? Did you figure out what you needed to? I hope so.” She pauses in that self-conscious-but-not way of hers. “I can’t say I’m happy about it – I’m not. But I understand closure. And until you have it – had it? – I don’t think we were ever going to get a real chance.”

Dan breathes, in and out. There’s a chance.

He didn’t know he still wanted one until now.

“I’m not sure I can deal with what that means, or if I’m ready for that chance yet, but you’ve given me a few. It was your turn. And if I can live with it, then who knows? Maybe this will make us stronger. We’ll talk when I get home.”

It’s a maybe that may never come to fruition, but…Now, Dan thinks that maybe he’s readier for love than he’d thought. Maybe he’s finally primed to grow up. And for the first time in a long time, he genuinely thinks he’d be cool with it if nobody other than Serena was there for the ride.

Dan’s voicemail tells him to press seven if he would like to delete the message.

He hits save instead.

 

 

 


End file.
